New Conductor and Familiar Soloist at Davies

Cellist Joshua Roman (from the SFS event page for last night’s concert)

Last night Davies Symphony Hall saw the debut of Colombian conductor Lina González-Grandos on the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Once again this was a program with a concerto at its core. Robert Schumann’s Opus 129 cello concerto in A minor had been planned to feature Pablo Ferrández as soloist. However, due to visa and travel complications, Ferrández could not appear in Davies; and he was replaced by Joshua Roman, a cellist familiar to many San Francisco music lovers.

Roman made his SFS debut in February of 2010 with Herbert Blomstedt conducting Joseph Haydn's 1765 cello concerto in C major, Hoboken VIIb/1. This was followed by his Bay Area recital debut in January of 2012 as the first artist to perform in San Francisco Performances’ newly launched Young Masters Series. Over the course of that decade, Roman’s activities have taken him beyond the confines of the concert hall, as comfortable giving a TED Talk as visiting HIV/AIDS centers and displacement centers in Uganda. Last night he returned to a more traditional setting.

Schumann composed his Opus 129 at a time when he was prodigiously creative (as might be guessed from the opus number). As is the case in his earlier (Opus 54) piano concerto in A minor, there is a smooth flow across the overall three-movement structure. However, the virtuoso turns for the cello account for only a portion of the delights in the overall listening experience. Schumann also engaged in a generous number of ventures into innovative instrumentation, and González-Granados made sure that listeners were aware of just how innovative those sonorities were. As a result both performers had their own ways of casting this concerto in the best possible light.

Roman was clearly familiar to many in the audience, and he was received with enthusiastic applause at the conclusion of the concerto. Clearly his fans wanted an encore, but they probably could not have anticipated what they got. Roman first remarked on the need to deal with crazy times, possibly by engaging in a bit of one’s own craziness. He then began to sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” providing his own arrangement of accompaniment on his cello. Many concert-goers probably know by now that “Hallelujah” has been sneaking its way in the encore repertoire of many vocalists. However, Roman’s approach was decidedly unique; and it was so convincing that he had most of the audience singing along during the final chorus. To mix metaphors, that encore performance established that, while we may not be out of the woods, we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The Schumann concerto was framed on either side by music from the first half of the twentieth century. The program concluded with Zoltán Kodály’s “Dances of Galánta,” a two-part slow-fast rhapsody that draws upon folk music that Kodály collected during his pioneering ethnomusicological research in Eastern Europe. Principal Clarinet Cary Bell had a generous share of clarinet work thanks to Kodály’s efforts to evoke the sonorities of the Romanian single-reed instrument for folk music.

The program began with the first of the two suites that Manuel de Falla extracted from his score for the two-act ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, choreographed by Leonid Massine for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The original score consisted of eight movements, four for each of the two acts. Falla’s suites each had four movements, but they did not follow either the grouping or the ordering of the original score. Thus, while there have been many performances of excerpts from this ballet score, the movements of the first suite were probably unfamiliar to most of the listeners in Davies.

Nevertheless, González-Granados brought an engaging sense of flow to the entire suite, which lasted only about ten minutes. Her balancing of the rich sonorities in Falla’s score made for a stimulating account of the full SFS resources. At the same time there were any number of more subtle sonorities, such as the writing for harp, that made the overall rhetoric indisputably compelling. There is an old joke that George Szell used to “play” the Cleveland Orchestra is if it was his “instrument” rather than an ensemble. González-Granados may not have been as manipulative as Szell, but she certainly knew how to give all the details the due credit that they deserved.